With the development of communication technology, high speed communication becomes more and more popular in modern communication. Long Term Evolution (LTE) is a technology for realizing high-speed packet-based communication that may achieve high data rates both in a downlink and in an uplink. Specifically, high speed communication is shown in the following aspects:
Wider band: LTE allows for a system bandwidth from 1.4 MHz to 20 MHz, while LTE-Advanced allows for a system bandwidth up to 100 MHz by carrier aggregation (CA).
Multiple antennas: In both LTE and LTE-A, Multiple-Input Multiple-Output (MIMO) is extensively applied to exploit high degrees of freedom in spatial domain, up to 8 layers in the downlink and 4 layers in the uplink.
Modulation technique: The modulation technique or the transmission method used is known as OFDM, which makes frequency resources more efficient.
In an OFDM system, high speed data communication may be occurred between multiple nodes. Usually, a node transmitting data may be called as a source node, and a node receiving data may be called as a destination node. An OFDM system in which data are transmitted from the source node to the destination node may comprise one or more base band units (BBUs) and one or more radio remote units (RRUs). In downlink data communication, a BBU may be considered as a source node, which usually performs base band signal processing and transmits base band signals to RRUs, and a RRU may be considered as a destination node, which usually converts the received data from base band to radio frequency and transmit the radio frequency data over one or more antennas to user terminals. In uplink data communication, a RRU may be considered as a source node and a BBU may be considered as a destination node. Thus, such BBU plus RRU architecture supports the connection between one baseband unit and one or more distributed RRUs.
In a conventional BBU plus RRU architecture, time domain In-phase/Quadrature (I/Q) data are exchanged between a BBU and one or more RRUs, where all baseband processing are centralized in the BBU. It is same for both downlink and uplink. One of challenges for the conventional BBU plus RRU architecture is high and sometimes very high requirement on I/Q transmission rate and bandwidth demand on backhaul. In addition, latency introduced by backhaul could impact on air-interface performance. More specifically, the challenges mainly include the following aspects (here, 15 bits per I or Q signal and 30.72e6 bps sample rate is assumed):                Wider band support typically requires higher transmission rate. For instance, in LTE with 20 MHz bandwidth, the rate of 0.92 Gbps (30.72e6*15*2) is required. When it comes to LTE-A with max 5 carries of up to 100 MHz, the rate is five times increased as 4.6 Gbps.        More receive antennas significantly increase the transmission rate on backhaul. For instance, in case of MIMO application with 8 element antennas, up to 7.36 Gbps (8*0.92 Gbps) on backhaul is required. With 100 MHz LTE-A system, the rate is significantly increased to 23 Gbps.        Latency becomes more serious when a backhaul network is getting complicated. For instance, when a BBU is connected with tens or hundreds of RRUs, point-to-point connections between the BBU and the RRUs are not cost efficient any more and a router-like device is deployed to make backhaul network economic. However, latency via router is sensitive and sometimes uncontrollable to incoming traffic from each RRU. Latency is typically getting large when traffic is in congestion status. Furthermore, different latency could result in synchronization problem on air-interface transmission/reception.        
In view of the foregoing problems, there is a need to provide an improved solution for transmitting and receiving data between a source node and a destination node.